You might be interested in seeing what I thought was the best option, while GW Bush was still sitting in the notorious kindergarten classroom:
I want to invade Afghanistan.
Everyone's expecting us to go in guns a-blazin', hell, the terrorists are
>> hoping for it; if we go in with a big military operation it will outrage some people, enlarge the scope of the conflict, polarize the currently neutral and create more people willing to die to kill Americans. In the meantime the practical results for us are probably minimal, trying to attack a small enemy hidden within a large populace with very little infrastructure with a military primarily designed to fight massive armored battles in western Europe.
So let's do the unexpected; let's bomb them with butter and blankets. We
send in legions of doctors, civil engineers, and teachers, thousands of Red Cross and Peace Corps and whoever else volunteers from all over the world, supplies, food, and medicine.
We conquer them with help.
We go in and we say "Yup, Allah is great, you know what else is great? Sanitation and clean drinking water."
We engage them, we work with them, we get to know them and we let them get to know us. All these people know of the United States is what they're told by our enemies, they don't have a media to provide them with information.
We show them that, despite our nation and culture's many problems, it's based on a way that does work pretty well for a lot of things. Most people will go with the way that works.
Of course the Taliban will go berserk; good. We send in too many people to possibly arrest, and a ton of media, ready to film images of the Taliban using force to prevent aid from reaching starving Muslims, and broadcast it worldwide. We hopefully get the general populace, not all that crazy about the Taliban in the first place, on our side; who knows, if they weren't freezing and starving and poverty-stricken and disease-ridden, they might have time to get together and do something about getting a real government!
How much support will the terrorists have if they start blowing up things in their own country? How many people will listen to them when they say that blankets and warm clothing and vaccinations must be resisted and fought against because we're the devil?
How can the other Muslim nations protest? Can they vilify us for being too nice? Our allies will love it, what could be easier to sell to their own populations; "Of course we support our fellows of Islam, we support them so much that we wouldn't dream of interfering with this humanitarian mission."
Look at our pattern of warfare; we bomb the hell out of them, then we go in and help them rebuild, and 50 years later they're our best buddies. I say, since Afghanistan's pretty much had the hell blown out of them already, that we just skip that step and move in with the rebuilding.
If this sounds like I'm advocating the use of our economic force to tempt and buy off the people who are supporting our enemies instead of facing them openly, then I'm glad I've communicated my position so well.
It's the last thing in the world that the terrorists would expect us to do, the one thing they would never in a thousand years be prepared for. Let us be sneaky and unpredictable for once!
